Wow. Pentax will do nothing next year, it will just sit and wait to die.
He really have no clue.

something they dont always teach you in school is that "do nothing" is a viable business strategy,

as sun tzu said, "dont interupt your enemy while he is making a mistake"

given the organizational re-structuring, the level at which consumer SLRS have skyrocketed in ability and plumeted in price, sitting back and watching the dust settle and then picking your path might actualy be a good move.

however i dont believe that Pentax will just do nothing, but i have little faith that whatever it is that they will do will be any significant.

Gooshin, I was saying "do nothing" as in "will not launch new products" - which in this market is not a viable business strategy
He's talking about what kind of products he expects to see from Nikon, Canon, Sony, Olympus, Fujifilm - but nothing about poor lil' Pentax. And yes, we know Pentax will launch new products next year. Maybe we'll even see something early next year

Mindflux, please clarify. I have Pentax branded quality glass... are you talking only about specific lenses?
And about Pentax presence in stores, this is not what I see in Romania - but the other way around, it's better than ever.

Wow. Pentax will do nothing next year, it will just sit and wait to die.
He really have no clue.

I think that the point he's trying to make is that no matter what Pentax does, the retailers will not have a margin that will allow them to have anything but Canon, Nikon and maybe Sony on the shelves.

I do not know if this is just a local issue with the distributor but I am seeing Pentax more and more all over the place. In large department style stores that normally do not sell dSLRs, now have a Pentax K200D amongst all their P&S items here in Australia.

The entire dSLR market has boomed but I think Pentax has hit the right mark with a competitively priced entry level K200D and the K2000D. A few hundred dollars gets you a reliable, feature packed dSLR for the same price as an advanced P&S. First time dSLR buyers is exactly where Pentax should be hitting the market to lure people to their 'system'.

Canon & Nikon will become expensive dreams for those who can no longer afford them. Those still wanting to buy will turn to the cheaper brands and Pentax will score in this area.

An expensive K2D pro level camera would have been foolhardy at this moment, given the economic turmoil. But in eighteen months to two years time, the many K2000D/K200D/KmD owners will happily look at upgrading to the next generation of K30D or K3D and the global financial outlook will be much brighter by then.

Of course Pentax is about to die, that is why they have just changed distributor in Sweden to one of the largest photo equipment distributors we have here. Just so that Pentax can increase their availability at photo stores and consumer electronics chains right in time for the funeral.

You see, Pentax will die with style. With more products in-store than ever.

That's what worries me about the K-m/K2000 strategy. AFAIK, selling lots of big macs requires that you have a lot of avenues to sell them to maximize such a high volume business...

The K-m strategy is starting to look like a bunch of Japanese suits falling on their swords. The cheap camera market is heavily numbers driven. If you don't sell enough product, you don't make a profit, and in the low end market, you need very high sales volumes.
Nikon, Canon and Sony have pretty much sewn the low end of the market up (well, the entire market, actually), and are going to be in a price war with each other for market share.
This is good for camera consumers, as it will push camera prices, especially the low end and mid range models, down. As this is where Pentax has chosen to "compete", they are in for a very rough ride.
Canon can pretty much afford to give cameras away if they want to, Sony probably could compete that way as well. I recall that Mitsubishi (a very large Japanese company) owned Nikon at one time, I don't know if this is still the case (or frankly if it ever was), but Nikon can soldier on because they have a primo reputation for making solid cameras.
Hoya is a big enough company to carry the Pentax brand, but will they? When they made the Pentax purchase, they made no secret that what they were really after was the medical and scientific imaging divisions, and that they were taking the camera division because it came along with the deal.
You can bet that if the camera division starts to hemorrhage money or becomes the corporate equivalent of an inflamed appendix, they will drop the brand.

So, you have three bulls in the ring butting heads, and trampling the small players in the process.
As much as I hate to admit it, Mr. Hogan makes a heck of a lot of sense

The good news is that Thom Hogan is always wrong in his predictions. The bad new is that he might be right this time.
There are no reasons to be optimistic on Pentax behalf. The financial crisis will hit the entry market hardest where the competition is fiercest.
For a company just taking over Pentax, Hoya has been suspeciously quiet. No vision, staking out new direction, agressive marketing or whatever... things that are expected with a change of owner. They seem to be focused on downsizing the operation while keeping the intelectual properties.
The talks about 645D and FF is possibly more about keeping the engeneers from fleeing the company than realistic product propositions.

Oh guys, please... Thom is just making a bunch of predictions which ANYONE could say. Nikon is about to make succesor of D2 which could be full frame?? Nikon could some lower class full frame to compete with Canon's 5D*?? NO SHIT!!! Photo communitiy is talking about that for years! Since Nikon and Canon are the biggest players on market, predicting their next move is quite easy, especially if they are mostly competing with each other!
Just a bunch of bullshit from him, nothing more...